There is considerable interest today in facilitating speech recognition with form-filling applications employed over a telephone system, and various systems and methods have been developed to facilitate the task of accomplishing speech recognition over the telephone. For example, to solve the problem of entering names, methods have been developed wherein the system asks the user to say both the name and the spelling of the name. Further in accord with these methods, two recognition experiments are conducted and the most coherent result is output. Similarly, constraint-based systems combine the spoken input of the name with a first spoken input, such as the initials, the identification of the user, or the user location. The first recognition result, after confirmation by the user, is used to constrain the second recognition process.
Unfortunately, the problems associated with speech recognition over the telephone affect all spoken input over the phone, and thus become compounded where a constraint-based speech recognition system uses recognized spoken input to constrain the second recognition process. Thus, fulfilling the need for a more reliable system and method of constraint for use with a speech recognition system over the telephone remains the task of the present invention.